Hacker News: a_nop

New comment by a_nop in "Wayland Isn't Going to Save the Linux Desktop (2022)"

a_nop — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 16:39:47 +0000

I thought Wayland was supposed to save the Linux Phone, not the Linux Desktop?

New comment by a_nop in "Intent to approve PEP 703: making the GIL optional"

a_nop — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 05:09:40 +0000

Unicode was absolutely a good change, the burn was the execution

New comment by a_nop in "Intent to approve PEP 703: making the GIL optional"

a_nop — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 01:28:09 +0000

They kind of burned a breaking major version transition for no good reason with 2-to-3, now they are prefacing a major change with "it won't be like 2-to-3". It sounds like they may be maintaining two operating modes in CPython 3 instead of going forward with another major transition, just because of that history.

New comment by a_nop in "A nearly 20-year ban on human spaceflight regulations is set to expire"

a_nop — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 19:28:53 +0000

I imagine they'll keep pushing this back until

a) a catastrophic accident impacts many people or

b) civilians are going to space in more significant numbers.

New comment by a_nop in "Twitter’s Rebrand to X Could Be a Trademark Nightmare Thanks to Microsoft"

a_nop — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 12:30:36 +0000

Getting press and attention, as seen here, for better or worse.

New comment by a_nop in "Illegal Life Pro Tip: Want to ruin your competitor's business?"

a_nop — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 05:25:11 +0000

Aside, one of the best hacks for networking without a smartphone is a small notepad and a pen in your pocket. Write things down for yourself and others e.g. phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, reminders.

New comment by a_nop in "Illegal Life Pro Tip: Want to ruin your competitor's business?"

a_nop — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 01:14:59 +0000

People get along fine without accounts in FAANG. You don't even need an account to use many Google services.

New comment by a_nop in "C’s Biggest Mistake (2009)"

a_nop — Sun, 02 Jul 2023 22:44:35 +0000

Supplying the array length to such a summing function is not a big deal. The compiler is not likely to handle this poorly. Probably gets inlined.

If the syntax is the problem, yeah, if you want first class data structures you might not like C.

New comment by a_nop in "The A-10 is retiring and the Air Force has no close air support replacement"

a_nop — Sun, 02 Jul 2023 22:31:50 +0000

A-10's replacement is drones, says the writing on the wall.

A-10 was developed for a Fulda Gap Cold War escalation, when Soviet Union had many many tanks at its disposal. China doesn't have near as many tanks as Soviets did, and now Russia's stocks are being depleted in Ukraine.

When you have drone/satellite coverage and know where everything is, you don't need loitering CAS as much, you can strike before threats are immediate with standoff munitions like what F-35 deploys, or artillery. Anything else you can clean up with drone Hellfires etc. loitering with less risk.

New comment by a_nop in "Alt-F4 #65 – Factorio visualizer in Unreal Engine 5"

a_nop — Sun, 02 Jul 2023 20:01:50 +0000

Mindustry is like a PvP Factorio-lite

New comment by a_nop in "Google search's death by a thousand cuts"

a_nop — Sun, 02 Jul 2023 19:54:35 +0000

"Fixing" search is, at this point, to Google, "getting people to click on more ads"

New comment by a_nop in "On Being Rich-ish: Lessons I learned becoming suddenly middle-class"

a_nop — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 16:03:28 +0000

Participating in class signaling is optional, starting with the choice of where to live. I can tell you from experience that if you find the right neighborhood, you can have good access and security and not have to cut your grass regularly. It's a big country.

New comment by a_nop in "Roboticists discover alternative physics"

a_nop — Wed, 03 Aug 2022 16:36:55 +0000

I'll be tickled when they discover the AI is measuring the lens distortion of the camera or some other artifact of the signal chain.

New comment by a_nop in "Use the Bazel Build System"

a_nop — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 19:32:08 +0000

All of my clients use Bazel now, so I've started using Bazel. I like it a lot, but there are some kludges when you get into any non-trivial chain of dependencies.

First off, if you depend upon another Bazel project which has its own dependencies, you need to clone dependencies from its WORKSPACE into yours for any targets you are hitting. If they chose to include macros for importing their dependencies, you may use those, but this would be opt-in. This is not technically unreasonable; you have all the power you need to have everything in your project depend upon a single version of a shared library or potentially import multiple versions (depending on how tangled the tree is), but you have to use this power, even if you don't care. Compare this to a non-sandboxed, more naive build using whatever version of libraries was found in the environment. You have the means to tightly control what is in the environment, or not care. With Bazel you have to care.

The dependency chain has led to a problem in practice when I tried to use Google's protobufs and Cython at the same time. The protobuf generated Python bindings use a particular version of Cython and override Cython's own Bazel rules, which seemed like a very rude and unnecessary practice. This made it impossible for me to use Cython in the same project as protobufs. A bug report to protobuf was met with "PR welcome."

As far as I can tell there are no "best practices" or features in Bazel to ease this kind of degenerate dependency chaining. If there are, a popular Google library decided not to use them. I consider dependencies to be the best and worst thing about Bazel; when it works it just works, when it doesn't it really doesn't.

All that said, I would probably use Bazel over pretty much any other alternative for business software in C++. For one-offs and PoC it is overkill.